Conservative talk radio

My readers in Canada (and those who don’t tune in talk radio) probably won’t have a good conception of just how ugly it is. Here’s a taste, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald at Salon

Camille Paglia writes today about the bile and deranged hate-mongering routinely spewed by right-wing talk radio. She writes about it as though it’s a new phenomenon when that’s what it’s been doing for several decades now, though perhaps she’s right that it has worsened since Obama’s election. Last night, someone named Andrew Wilkow guest-hosted Mark Levin’s radio program — one of the highest-rated right-wing talk radio shows in America, whose host is selling more books to a right-wing audience right now than anyone since their leading intellectual historian compared liberals to Nazis with a smiling Hitler face on the cover — andwithin the first fifteen minutes this is what he said:

Perez Hilton, who I am now terming a vile sodomite . . . yeah, Perez, you’re a vile sodomite – doesn’t that word have a ring to it – sodomite — and vile – vile sodomite – it just sounds so good to hear in my headphones – vile sodomite . . . . I’m not sure whose idea it was to have an overweight homosexual . . . What do gays constitute? They could announce the cure for AIDS on Logo and nobody would know for two weeks . . . And again, Perez Hilton, you’re a vile sodomite . . . and then this vile sodomite . . .

There is lots of ink being spilled about the reasons for the collapse of the Right, the causes of the contempt with which young Americans in particular view them. It really isn’t that complicated. They’re repulsive. That’s obviously not true for all conservatives, but the face their movement puts forward increasingly is this one. What kind of people would listen to something like this and react with anything other than pure repulsion, a desire to remain as far away from people like this as possible?